Writing on the Double Yellow Line

Militant moderate, unwilling to concede any longer the terms of debate to the strident ideologues on the fringe. If you are a Democrat or a Republican, you're an ideologue. If you're a "moderate" who votes a nearly straight party-ticket, you're still an ideologue, but you at least have the decency to be ashamed of your ideology. ...and you're lying in the meantime.

Saturday, June 10, 2017

Diogenes, the Libertarian

By
now most of us have read the articles and laughed, and some of us have watched
the videos and guffawed. A drunken strumpet
having a bad hair day gets booted from a comedy club, then arrested, and then lays
into the cops in slurring, vitriolic invective.
She [it was a woman] attempts to parlay her status as a television
reporter into some kind of Get Out Of Jail Free card − it doesn’t work. Another comedian at the club records her
performance art on his phone and posts it to the internet. The following day she claims, though her
family attorney, to have been drugged.
She was fired from her television reporting job anyway.

It was a classic object lesson in the negative aspects of self-important, anti-social
tantrum. She was charged with disorderly
conduct, criminal mischief [whatever that is], and resisting arrest. Resisting arrest is the pile-on feel-good
charge offered up when cops don’t really have anything substantive. We never see murderers or armed robbers
charged with murder or armed robbery … and
resisting arrest. Whenever resisting
arrest is announced, it’s fairly prima facie that the major issue is that the
cop’s ego was bruised, the poor dears.

*
- Club employees escort drunken strumpet from venue to public sidewalk where
cops were waiting

*
- Cops confront drunken strumpet about her actions inside venue

*
- Drunken strumpet lambastes cops for being, well, cops

*
- Cops cuff drunken strumpet

*
- Drunken strumpet continues to berate cops

*
- Cops eventually haul her away

What happened next, though, is Grade-A
statist apologism and rationalization.
People the nation over cheered and huzzahed. Many manly he-men volunteered assorted
fisticuffs to punctuate their disapproval of her actions. It would be one thing − and completely understandable,
if still distasteful − were these statist apologists the standard democrats and
republicans who celebrate hyper-reactive government involvement in nearly every
aspect of human interaction. But they
weren’t.

They claimed to be libertarians, which makes it inexcusable.

The worst part about it, none
of those professing to possess libertarian sensibilities could understand why
their hairy chest-pounding was putrid statism.

The first and most common excuse offered up is that the woman at the center of
the nothingness assaulted someone by spitting.
First … there was nothing in any of the written accounts that asserts
she definitively spit on anyone. Second …
we’re supposed to be libertarians here.
Spitting is, under the worst of circumstances, little more than a second
grader’s preferred method of making the girls in class run screeching, next to
eating bugs and turning eyelids inside out.
Big-girl panties, guys; pull ‘em up.

To be fair, there were multiple accounts stating that the cop-denouncing woman −
and I will quote from one of those accounts − “appeared to attempt” to
spit, but the target of her expectoration changed from version to version,
rendering the accusation suspect at best and contrived at worst. I have no doubt, though, from what I remember
about my, and observed in others’, bouts of pronounced drunkenness that more
than a few people in her vicinity were hit with spittle from the volume and
relentlessness of her tirading. But spray
is not the same thing as hocking a loogie.

Yet it was over this
assault-by-saliva claim that most of the − ahem − libertarians offered to deconstruct
the orthodontics her parents had paid for.
“Self-defense”, more than one suggested.

Sorry, no. Self-defense, under law,
permits only those actions which are necessary to prevent another similar assault,
while using the minimum force available.
Someone spitting at you is not justifiably met with a punch to the teeth
any more than it is justifiably met with a folding chair across the shoulders
or a gunshot to the torso. Minimum
necessary force to prevent being spat upon a second time by a woman handcuffed by police consists of moving out
of loogie-range, and not a lot else.

Self-defense against projectile saliva under libertarians’ holy Non-Aggression
Principle, however, would be a different matter. Does the NAP justify disproportionate
response? Dunno. A quick straw poll of libertarians on US
self-defense against terrorists knocking down some really tall buildings in
2001 and the 16-year war waged since then might prove illuminating.

The relevant question is: what would the NAP allow as self-defense against the appearance of an attempt to perform juvenile micro-aggression? Would it allow more than the appearance of an attempt at self-defense?

The follow-on statist argument made by non-libertarian libertarians is, “Yabbut
… spitting is assault, and attempting to spit is attempted assault. Both are crimes!”

The State defines many things as crimes, including not buckling up, not buying
health insurance, and smoking “herbage”.
The State does these things because it can and because not enough people
call them on it. Courts certainly aren’t
about to do their duty and nullify laws made in excess of the government’s
defined power to make law. Not without a
revolution waiting in the wings. We’re
supposed to be libertarians here; we understand that just because The State
calls it a crime doesn’t mean squat to libertarian political philosophy.

Assault-by-saliva is one of
those crimes. It is childish and
repulsive; nothing more.

Other excuses made for the arrest of this drunken strumpet over her outburst
are that she was drunk in public, which
is a crime. Again, just because The State
calls it a crime …

She was a possible danger to herself. But we’re still libertarians; The State is
not defined to be our Mommy.

The
government has an obligation to provide public safety. Apart from “providing public safety” being
impossible without locking everyone up because they’re suspicious, it is only actually
attempted by a police-state. A free
country housing free citizens requires that the government only pester those
who have actually committed crimes falling within the legitimate authority of that
government to define crime, and then only when there is enough evidence to
support pestering them over it. This
drunken strumpet had done nothing that reached that lofty elevation; at most the police should have shooed
her to a cab, or taken her home themselves.

She
was asked to leave the comedy club; she was therefore trespassing. No, crime cannot retroactive, and trespassing
is no different. She was escorted out of
the comedy club to the sidewalk. … where she stayed. … partly because she was
almost immediately handcuffed, but still.
Among the crimes that she had not committed was especially trespassing.

It’s real simple, here: we’re
libertarians. We do not advise or
condone the involvement of The State merely because of a squabble between
self-interested private parties. In this
case, the self-interests were a drunken strumpet who couldn’t hold her liquor
and a comedy club whose comedian couldn’t handle a heckler. Liberty requires the freedom to squabble and the freedom to handle those
squabbles privately, without The State.

If you want police in the
vicinity just to make sure nothing gets out of hand … fine. Hey, there might’ve been a few barrel-chested
libertarians wanting to take the opportunity to slug a drunken strumpet appearing to attempt to hock a loogie. But unless things do get out of hand, the cops
are there, just like everyone else, to eat popcorn and watch the squabble.

Nor does being libertarian and reducing the involvement of The State to
observer status mean that we condone anti-social behavior and immature
outbursts. Even if those outbursts are
First Amendment-protected and − when directed at the cops − largely accurate
and deserved. It means we take videos on
our smart phones and post them on the internet to serve as an object lesson in
knowing one’s upper limit on alcohol.

Non-state social sanction is,
in the long run, a far better deterrent to these tantrums than heavy-handed
police-statism if only because it deters a state becoming a police-state. Again: we’re libertarians; we’re supposed to
live and breathe this philosophy. So
live it and breathe it; own your philosophy.
I shouldn’t have to keep reminding everyone what they claim to stand
for.